The World Bank had estimated that a successful agreement to lower tariffs would have raised global GDP by $500 billion by 2015, the bulk of that increase in wealth going to poor countries. That is why the obstructionist tactics of the big developing countries–Brazil, India, Nigeria–were so self-defeating. At the end of the day, any deal that reduces rich-country tariffs gives the poor some access to those huge markets. In the last global trade talks, signed in Uruguay in 1994, rich countries cut their tariffs by 20 percent. This time around, they were likely to cut “bound tariffs” by about 50 percent.
This is not to excuse the United States and the European Union: they’ve earned their own booby prizes of late. They proved stubbornly unwilling to compromise on their massive farm subsidies. In fact, the United States–that is, the “free market” Bush administration–has increased farm subsidies and steel tariffs over the last two years. The European Union proved even more determined to maintain its farm-welfare programs. Given Europe’s rhetoric of compassion for the Third World, this was particularly galling to many poor-country representatives.
There is a leadership vacuum in the world these days–on almost every major issue. Consider what’s happened in the last week, besides the Cancun fiasco, which is the biggest setback for free trade in decades. The U.S. and key European states started tussling over Iraq again, and a cooperative approach to building democracy there seems unlikely. Kofi Annan is urging a radical overhaul of the United Nations to save it from irrelevance. Sweden’s “no” vote on the euro once again points up the fact that the EU cannot decide what it wants to look like, a nation-state or a multilateral group.
Across different areas, important institutions and alliances that have helped manage international peace and prosperity are coming apart. Patterns of cooperation are eroding; new frictions are emerging. The world order we have gotten used to over the last half century is slowly crumbling.
Part of this is inevitable. The post-1945 institutions are increasingly anachronistic, built in a different age for different purposes. The Western Alliance was forged in the fires of anti-communism; victory in the cold war has fractured its unity. The European Union’s desire to become a unitary state was a reaction to Europe’s world wars, which are increasingly a distant memory. Free trade was Washington’s reaction to the protectionism of the 1930s. But part of it is a spectacular lack of leadership, on display everywhere in the world.
But the most vital leadership vacuum is in the United States. It is the only country that has the power to help repair, revive or reinvent arrangements to help manage global peace and prosperity. This is the time for intense and creative efforts along these lines. But at this crucial moment in world history, the influential hard-liners in the Bush administration stand in theological opposition to the very idea of international cooperation.
Even when the administration comes to multilateralism, as it did last week, it does so grudgingly and halfheartedly; President Bush’s excellent television address, asking for help one Sunday, is quickly countered the next Sunday by Vice President Cheney’s combative (and dishonest) performance. The administration is consumed with score-settling and almost delights in the petty vanities and missteps of the French because it discredits multilateralism.
But the imperial style of foreign policy is backfiring. At the end of the Iraq war the administration spurned any kind of genuine partnership with the world. It pounded away at the United Nations, explaining that legitimacy would come only by giving Iraq back to the Iraqis. The Europeans, cut out from any participation, have now decided to hang Washington by its own rhetoric, coming out in favor of an even faster transfer back to the Iraqis. Key Iraqis have jumped on this proposal and are making common cause with the Europeans. (Ahmad Chalabi has apparently shocked his neoconservative patrons with his ingratitude.)
So unilateralism has produced a multilateral free-for-all, a chaotic jockeying for power over which the United States is losing control. This is bad for Iraq, bad for the United States and bad for the prospects for international cooperation. One can only hope it will be a lesson in how not to manage the next foreign-policy crisis.
